Students get hands-on learning at Manitoba Envirothon

Owen Edmonds pored over a soil bag with four of his classmates, exchanging tips and scientific instruments.

The 17-year-old Collège Churchill High School student, located in Winnipeg, was racing against the clock to scribble down results from the team’s experiment on April 23 during the Manitoba Envirothon’s east regional competition at the Tourond Creek Discovery Centre. It’s the second year his team has entered the competition. It’s a rare opportunity where students can take lessons from the environment back to their classroom studies, Edmonds said.

“It’s good that we can spread word to other people about the importance of preserving land and making sure that the environment is staying healthy,” he said.

The discovery centre, located in the RM of Hanover, hosted the Manitoba Association of Watershed’s competition for the second year.

Teams of five students from 10 different schools competed for top marks while performing scientific experiments and analysis at the marshland. Students had 10 minutes at each of the 12 stations to do activities such as soil tests, plant identification and local species studies.

Each team member trains for a special interest, which include plant ecology, soil ecology, aquatic ecology, wild life ecology and the theme: land use and agricultural management.

Rain from the night before turned the trails into soupy puddles as highschoolers raced through the mud in their jeans and sneakers, eager to start the next test. A chorus of leopard and wood frogs croaks sound-tracked each of the marshland science stations.

Jennifer Hunnie, steering committee chair for the Manitoba Envirothon, said the questions are designed to help students collaborate as a group while still letting each specialization be highlighted.

Each station offers experience doing tasks that professional researchers would be doing in the field, such as quadratic population sampling, which uses measured squares to count species in an area.

She hopes the on-site exposure will create interest for the next generation of researchers.

“These students are so passionate about it, and they get right in there, and they try so hard to make real world connections,” Hunnie said.

Kenneth Yost, a science teacher at Grant Park High School in Winnipeg, sees the competition as a practical form of education that can’t be replaced by in-classroom teaching.

“It’s just kids being out doing science, rather than sitting there being told science,” he said. “Our kids put a lot of time and effort in on their own time, and it shows a level of dedication and interest that I think a lot of these kids nowadays don’t have, and these ones have the wherewithal to do it.”

Yost sees value in bringing students into rural areas to expand their environmental view outside of the “giant buildings of brick in the middle of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers,” spurring conversations about wildlife that wouldn’t happen staying in Winnipeg.

The testing stations also allow students to see different career opportunities to relate to environmental work, he said, through interacting with the volunteers, many of whom are researchers or scientists.

“A lot of people seem to think that ‘I’m going to do science because I’m going into medicine or I want to be an engineer,’ Yost said.

”There’s all these other things out there and a lot of them we don’t really realize exist until you go to one of these things and go ‘Oh there is a large organization that hires people to keep wetlands in southeastern Manitoba vibrant.”

Joey Pankiw, manager for the Seine Rat Roseau Watershed District, said hosting the competition in the region is a good way to show off the Tourond Creek Discovery Centre and expose the students to nature they wouldn’t have the opportunity to see.

“For them (students) to experience a day out, with the sunshine, winds blowing and it’s warm out, they’re gonna get their hands and probably their feet dirty here,” he said. “To being able to reconnect with nature, it’s something that’s vital for kids.”

He was disappointed to see no teams from southeastern Manitoba schools at the event. The closest team to the Southeast that participated was from Altona. Pankiw’s goal is to have teams from each of the high schools represented from within the watershed district.